Even
though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a
large portion of the web's population is still running on good old
dial up connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the
equation when you're designing your website, and a very major
consideration we have to make for dial up users is the loading time of
your website.
Generally,
all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even
on a dial up connection. The culprit of slow loading sites is mainly
large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a
delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your
users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.
You
should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your
site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really
mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary
information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file
size of your image without affecting its appearance.
If you
own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image
as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the
"quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to
10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while
saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there
are many free image compressors online that you can download and use
to reduce your image's file size.
On the
other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the
best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in
GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color
information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest
file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often
compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!
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